Dec 15th Update: I’ve added who I think you should buy the Arbitrage Conspiracy through IF you are planning to buy it. If you read about his Arbitrage Conspiracy bonuses I think it will be clear why I’m recommending you buy through him.

Dec 14th Update: Based on some feedback I got from Mike below I feel the need to point out that I was NOT at the Arbitrage Conspiracy event – so the best use of this information is to make sure that the things I mention are covered in the course – and if you DO buy the course to get the best bonuses as I suggest at the end.

Basically – take this with a grain of salt…but I suggest you read it AND read the feedback which gives a useful and different perspective.

ALSO, one of my main mentors – Nikhil Parekh - someone who is brilliant at marketing and who’s opinion I value extremely highly DOES recommend the course, although I wish he was giving bonuses as if you bought through him I’m sure he would have extremely helpful bonuses.

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Update Dec 15, 2008: IF you ARE going to buy the Arbitrage Conspiracy I would recommend you buy it through James Schramko and get his important bonuses here:

One last thing: James has worked closely with BOTH Aymen AND Nikhil so I really would be stunned if you there would be a better person for you to hook up with him.

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So with that out of the way, here was my original opinion based on what limited information was available:

I’m going to tell you right now that you should NOT buy the Arbitrage Conspiracy – unless you are already a very experienced marketer – and even THEN you’ll understand after reading this information why you probably STILL should not buy The Arbitrage Conspiracy.

There are extremely experienced marketer’s like Jerry West telling people not to by the Arbitrage Conspiracy product and even told the guys at John Cow: ‘Don’t get sucked into the hype. It isn’t real. I was there and I walked out after 40 minutes because the material was very basic.’

That’s interesting – because if they do NOT cover one VITAL aspect of running CPA marketing – and that is keeping track of a huge inventory of CPA offer start and end dates and having an automatic way of starting a new offer when one expires you are going to go completely nuts.

My business partner and I run CPA offer through a large number of organic sites and we use an open source ad-serving solution called OpenX.org to manage that type of thing – although there are also commercial ad serving services like AdJuggler, AdSpeed, and AdButler to name a few.

One thing I don’t agree with is that selling the course will bring about too much competition for the owners – that was something Charles Heflin from SEO2020 was saying. But the truth is that the amount of viable traffic for CPA offers is just enormous – and even if you use the ONE rudimentary trick of using domains as keywords they “revealed” (um, that trick has been revealed MANY times over the past several years – including by ME. LOL) there are SO many ways to go about finding them that even in ONE market you could have hundreds of people “playing well” together – and there are man, many markets where CPA offers are findable – PLUS if you really want to you can work out deals with businesses in markets where they are NOT common.

So in my opinion all of this noise about “If it’s so profitable why are they selling it?” is nonsense.

BUT I would also point out that certain CPA tricks are MUCH harder for people NEWER to PPC to pull off.

For example – I one ran a test on the “domains as keywords” technique on Adwords and discovered that often the NEWER advertisers are kind of screwed. Here’s what I did:

I had a friend of mine who had advertised minimally on Adwords for about a year put in the EXACT Ad, Exact Offer, and Exact Keywords (match type, etc.) going to the EXACT same landing page (this was direct-linking) and what we discovered was very interesting and should be disheartening for anyone considering buying the the Arbitrage Conspiracy:

His minimum bids we’re often between .50 to $1.00 per click while MINE for the EXACT same set up were between .15 – .30 per click!

In other words, it appears that Account History has a fairly major impact on bid prices in some (maybe many) cases.

Now, you can certainly build up a great account history – but that means that you’ll probably have to WAIT until you can pull off some of the more profitable tricks such as the one “revealed” in the free Arbitrage Conspiracy training…(I’m not sure why I keep using “revealed” for that domains as keywords trick – it’s almost like saying I’ve just discovered “THE INTERNET”).

So I wouldn’t call Arbitrage Conspiracy a scam, but I CANNOT recommend it – especially if you are not already an experienced marketer – and if you ARE then you’d probably know everything in the course from what I’m hearing from people like Jerry West.

To be notified when his full review of the Arbitrage Conspiracy is live sign up for his newsletter.

I guess the one thing I would leave you with is – if you STILL plan to buy The Arbitrage Conspiracy system then look for a bonus or bonuses that cover one or all of the following:

How to manage a huge volume of CPA offers.

How to manage start and end dates of CPA offers.

How to build a CPA affiliate “team”.

Strategies for establishing a high-quality Adwords Account

Update Dec 15th: I read through the full free report that was given out and it was incredibly disappointing. Not only was it “below basic level” they had the audacity to call it a “game-changing report”. That stinks.

In fact you can learn more valuable information from reading the sales letter. I think the only realistic thing for you to do if you are considering this course is to hook up with someone who has more detailed knowledge about it than most of the affiliates I’ve seen seem to have.

The main person I’m recommending you ask questions to is James Schramko as not only does he know what he’s doing when it comes to online marking, but he also has worked with Aymen AND Nikhil Parekh closely.